Omnigamy
The New Kinship System
A hapless British cabinet minister responsible
for the hapless UK telephone system once complained that the more phones
installed in his country, the more there were to call, and so the demand for
phones increased: supply creates demand. Somewhat the same thing is happening
with marriage in America. The more divorces there are, the more experienced marriers
exist, ready to remarry –and many do. The divorce rate has jumped 250 percent
in the past 21 years; about 80 percent of the formerly married remarry. With
each new marriage, the parents and children involved acquire a whole new set of
relatives, friends, and associations—in effect, they stretch their kinship
system. Many people are married to people who have been married to other people
who are now married, but to whom somebody has likely been married. Our society,
once based on the principle of solid monogamy until death, has shifted toward a
pattern of serial polygamy, in which people experience more than one spouse, if
only one at a time. Thus we appear to be moving to a new and imprecise system we
might call omnigamy, in which each will be married to all.